Go2Linux | Linux Operating System

Preliminary

This march 14th the verson 1.3.8 of VirtualBox was released

VirtualBox is an opensource virtualization software, it has a nice graphical interface like VMWare, and which is a lack of QEMU, recently (march, 14th) it has released its version this is what their site says about VirtualBox.

"InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "InnoTek" for more about our company."

Here I will show step by step and with screenshots how to install VirtualBox on your Linux to install another OS on it, in this case I will show this until booting Debian Etch as the gest, the VirtualBox software will be installed on an Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) as the host.

Preparing your host system

First we need to get some software installed on our host server

sudo apt-get install make

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

Download the software

The software can be download from this link select the appropiate binary for your distro or get the tarbal from here Be sure to download the latest version, on this guide we will show how to install using the .deb package for Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS.

Installing VirtualBox

Now open the terminal by clicking to "terminal" and press ENTER or click on Ok

Now go to your users manage utility under GNOME is located at: Desktop->Administration ->Users and Groups.
And add yourself to the vboxusers group

Or do it from the console be editing the file, /etc/group, with your favorite text editor, it should like this on the vboxusers groups.

vboxusers:x:1001:youruserhere

Running VirtualBox

To run the graphic console just enter the command VirtualBox on your terminal

Click on new, and choose a name for your virtual machine, and also choose the OS type you will install on it

Choose the memory amount, and click on next and next again

Choose if you would like to have a growing disk, which will start small and will be growing, as you gest system needs more space, or a fixed size, on which your virtual machine will count with all the available space on disk from the very begining, the first is disk space saver but the second, will make your virtual machine to run faster

Choose the size of disk you want to be availble for the virtual machine

That is all you have your Virtual machine almost ready to run

Now choose from where you are going to instal your OS, in my case I choosed an ISO image of Debian Etch NetInstall CD

Now you are ready to run your Virtual Machine and here is the result